TRADITOM and El3ments renew the alliance to get traditional farmers and chefs to experience the quality of traditional tomatoes (GOURMETOM II)

For the second year TRADITOM will collaborate with El3ments in opening parts of the TRADITOM collection of tomatoes for farmers and prestigious chefs to experience their variability, uniqueness and special characteristics for a variety of uses.

Recently TRADITOM partners had a meeting with El3ments where a total of 60 traditional tomato varieties dubbed GOURMETOM II were selected. As a subset of TRADITOM, this selection covers a variety of tomato types of flavours and also a range of attractive tomatoes with different sizes, colours and shapes which are of interest for restaurants and chefs. These varieties are being cultivated in Burriana, in the same plot of land recovered for horticultural farming by El3ments and located near Castellón/ Valencia as the one used last year for the 100 colour collection.

The joint strategy of El3ments with CSIC is to use this GOURMETOM II set of varieties (see list and characteristics in our web page) to review together with a selected group of local farmers some of the variability present in TRADITOM. The potential interest for farmers willing to cultivate them in order to supply high quality traditional products (e.g, to local restaurants) has also been assessed . A second meeting with the farmers and chefs is currently being organized for June 2018 in the Farm House near the plot of El3ments, a detailed program for this activity will follow soon.

Three TRADITOM varieties are also being cultivated for a supermarket chain specialized in restaurants as a first experience /study case of cooperation with this supermarket chain in traditional tomatoes. The current selection GOURMETOM II is in part the outcome of a meeting between farmers, El3ments and CSIC and UPV members of TRADITOM aimed to produce a selection of TRADITOM varieties that present the best characteristics for both farmers and final users (i.e. restaurants). That selection was based on the extensive phenotyping conducted in the frame of the TRADITOM project and includes traits of interest of the different stakeholders: producers/ farmers, consumers, traders, transporters, small and large supermarkets, local and global (see diagram).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 634561.